1 The Hidden Room Chapter 1

Julia Weller

It was when Celeste lifted up the canvas tote bag that she saw the letter lying on the floor boards underneath it. She hadn't noticed it when she'd dropped the bag earlier that evening. She had been too upset by her encounter with René on the way home. Stuck to the front of the envelope was a large pink Post-It note with a white bunny rabbit logo. Beryl Bunny. Why did she put this letter through the mail slot? Val du Lac was so small, it didn't have a postman and most people stopped by the Post Office once or twice a week to pick up their mail. Beryl Bunny was the Postmistress and. if she thought something was particularly important, she would drop off the mail in person on her way home, and usually invite herself in for a cup of coffee to catch up on the town gossip. But Celeste wasn't expecting any special mail and Beryl Bunny obviously hadn't counted on Celeste working late.

The note covered most of the thick long cream-colored envelope. "Hon, this letter came by FedEx so I thought it was important. The FedEx envelope wouldn't fit in your slot so I took the letter out." It was signed "B.B." Celeste peeled off the note and saw that there was an embossed address on the outside of the envelope. Bernstein, O'Sullivan and Brown, Attorneys at Law. The address was on Park Avenue, New York. Why is a New York law firm writing to me?

Puzzled, Celeste sat down at her grandmother's desk and switched on the desk lamp. She picked up the letter opener shaped like a sword and slit open the envelope, spilling the contents onto the desk. A paper folder with "Angus Travel Agents" printed in big red type on the outside fell out first. Celeste opened the folder and pulled out an airline ticket, with a carbon copy of some sort of schedule, with her name and the names of several cities printed on it. That's when she realized the plane ticket was for her. Celeste had never been on a plane in her life. The furthest she had ever been from Val du Lac was Vancouver, in British Columbia. When she was in seventh grade and Gramps was still alive, they had driven across the Rockies to the West Coast of Canada. Her grandparents had friends there and they had spent a wonderful week in a big city. Why is someone sending me a plane ticket to New York? I don't even know anyone in New York.

Celeste pulled a letter from the envelope. As she began reading, she felt the blood rushing from her head. This can't be possible. This has to be a mistake. The writer wanted to inform her that his name was Stockard Brown and that he was the executor of the last will and testament of one Margaret Frances McCade. It was his duty to inform her that she, Celeste Gillespie, was the sole heir of her great-aunt, who had died and left Celeste an apartment in New York. She was to come to New York as soon as possible to meet with the executor. A flight had been booked for her on December 16, 2005 but if that was not convenient, the date could be changed. She was asked her to call him as soon as she received his missive.

Celeste let the letter drop from her fingers. This can't be true. How could I, Celeste Gillespie, have inherited an apartment in New York? Me, of all people? Her mind turned back to the events earlier in the evening.

"Thanks for closing up, Celeste!" Emily Harrison had called from the vestibule where she was putting on her overshoes. She left them there in the mornings to keep the slush off the library floor. Most people didn't bother but as Head Librarian, Emily believed in keeping the floor as clean as possible. Emily stuck her head around the door. She had the purple woolen hat with the ear flaps and red pom-pom pulled down to her eyebrows and was winding a long black scarf around her neck, mouth and nose. With her tartan coat and mustard-colored pants, she looked like a gaudily dressed bank robber.

"Don't forget the troll!" With that last muffled command and a wave of a purple-mittened hand, she ducked out through the vestibule doors and Celeste heard the main door to the library wheeze open and closed. Even though she was behind the checkout desk and separated by several table lengths from the entrance, Celeste felt the cold winter air creep noiselessly into the reading room.

She pulled her grandmother's sweater more tightly around her shoulders and headed for the children's reading section. The troll lay face-down among the baby toys on the brightly woven scatter rugs. Celeste picked it up and dusted off the cookie crumbs and candy paper stuck to its nose. The troll, almost the size of a small child and dressed in a blue felt vest, forest green hat and red trousers, was a favorite with children. They liked to include him in their games and reading circles, despite his fierce look and the large teeth jutting out from his lower jaw. Every few weeks, one of the librarian staff would take him home to shampoo his fur and wash his clothes. Today it was Celeste's turn.

"C'mon, Olaf," said Celeste as she tucked him under her arm and stepped gingerly over the toy bus and a plastic tea set. She was the only one who called the troll by his official name. The children all had their own pet names for him. Celeste turned out the lights, thankful that the cleaning lady would be along later to pick up the children's toys.

It was dark outside and had been dark for hours. The sun set early in the winter afternoons this far north in Idaho. The snow crunched under Celeste's boots and she walked fast, her chin buried in the collar of her grandmother's fur coat. It had snowed earlier and the street was largely deserted except for a few teenagers hanging about outside the movie theater.

It wasn't so long ago that I was one of them. Only a year ago, in fact. That was when she didn't have a care in the world. Well, that wasn't exactly true—she'd worried about her SAT results and her college applications. But those were nothing compared to what came later. As she passed the laughing group, she recognized several of them from high school. Quickly she pulled the collar up higher, trying to hide her face. She didn't want to talk to them.

"Hey, Celeste!" called a voice. "Who's your friend? Is he your date for tonight?" There was a series of guffaws and Celeste turned to give the group a furious glance. Then she saw him standing to one side, watching her. He wasn't laughing and his hands were thrust in his jean pockets. His dark hair was uncovered and his narrow deep-set eyes were watching her. Celeste felt her cheeks flame but she strode on doggedly.

Of all the people I had to run into, why did it have to be René? When did he get back? Why couldn't he have stayed away? He's been gone this long, all during the horrible weeks that Grandma was in the hospital, shrinking away. He must have known. But he didn't come back. Not even during all the long bleak months afterwards. What did he have to come back for now?

She recalled their last disjointed conversation, just before he'd left. Arriving at her grandmother's doorstep just minutes after she'd helped her grandmother out of the taxi and into the house, he had stood there in the doorway, not even bothering to come in. She could almost hear that sing song voice of his again, telling her in his funny English that he was going away. No explanation, no apologies.

And Celeste had been too numb, too shocked by what she'd just found out from her grandmother's doctor to question him, and too proud to ask him to stay. What René was saying had seemed as unreal to her as what she'd heard at the hospital. His words were just part of the continuing waking nightmare, slowly pulling her in, trapped with no escape. He'd asked her something—she couldn't remember what—but Celeste had been afraid to say anything for fear of breaking down. She could only cope with one crisis at a time so she'd shut the door on him. Had he called her name? She wasn't sure. Her grandmother needed her.

A few hours earlier, René's bomb shell would have been the worst thing that could have happened to her. But now nothing could match what the doctor had explained so grim-faced about the tests he'd done on Grandma. What was abnormal had become normal. Leaning her back against the door, she wondered when everything had begun to slip out of focus. It was only a few weeks ago that she'd noticed how much skinnier Grandma was and how sunken her face suddenly looked. And then René had begun to act strangely. He seemed cool suddenly, even abrupt. They'd had their first big argument. He'd accused her of always favoring her grandmother, of putting her grandmother before him, of taking her side against him.

"What do you mean, taking sides? Grandma's sick, can't you see that? I have to go with her to the doctor—how is that taking sides? How can you be jealous of my Grandma?"

"That is not what I mean," René had muttered.

Celeste felt the frustration and anger rising like bile in her mouth. In the pit of her stomach was a terrible fear, it was like something gnawing inside her. She was trying to tell him how scared she was for her Grandma but instead of trying to help, René was acting like a child having a tantrum because he wasn't getting the attention he wanted.

"So what do you mean?" she'd yelled at him

But he didn't answer. Instead, his dark, narrow eyes looked at her with anger.

"I have to go," Celeste said stormily. "You can call me when you're ready to tell me what's bothering you."

She would have worried more that night about was happening between her and René if she hadn't been so concerned about Grandma's labored breathing. She hoped that the doctor would tell her that there was nothing to worry about, that of course her grandmother would get better. But he hadn't said that.

On the way home in the taxi, Celeste held her grandmother in her arms and rocked her gently, the way Grandma had rocked her when she was little. She tried not to think about what the doctor had said. But she had to tell René so he'd understand why she couldn't spend so much time with him anymore. After she got Grandma to bed, she was going to call him to tell him what she'd found out and cry on his shoulder. But he'd knocked on the door before she had a chance to call him.

So she hadn't opened the door when he called her name that last time. She wasn't going to let him see her crying.

It seemed to her that she could still hear René's voice calling and she reached up to pull the hat down over her ears, hoping to block out the sound of his voice and the memory of that last time. Olaf slid from under her arm and fell to the ground.

"Here, I will help," said a voice. Celeste turned and saw René's tall figure behind her. In one smooth motion, he leaned over and swung the troll up off the ground. His face was half in shadows but she could see the twisted smile as he looked down at Olaf.

"You not a bit old for dolls, M'amie?" he said, using the old familiar endearment. He held out the troll. Celeste snatched it from him and without a word, turned on her heel. How dare he? How dare he make fun of me like all the others?

She ran, slipping and sliding on the ice under the fresh layer of snow, to the house she had shared with her grandparents since she was a little girl. She fumbled desperately in the tote bag full of books for the keys but they'd buried themselves somewhere her mittened hand couldn't find them. She took off her glove and her fingers were frozen by the time she found the keys and was able to get the door open. With a sigh of relief, she switched on the light in the sitting room and dropped the troll and her tote bag on the floor next to the door. There was no one to greet her and no delicious smell of cooking wafting from the kitchen, but Celeste was almost used to living alone now. If it just weren't so dark so early when I came home in the winter.

Even though her grandmother hated them, Celeste had bought herself a stack of what Grandma called dismissively "TV dinners." Her Grandma never bought prepared foods—she had spent most of her married life cooking huge quantities of fresh meals for ranch hands and could never get used to buying store-made meals. She refused to buy a microwave oven and insisted that food had to be cooked slowly, not "irradiated." Celeste shared her grandmother's love of cooking and even after she reached middle school, helped in the kitchen, trying new recipes from her grandmother's magazines. She'd only started buying Lean Cuisine meals after Grandma died. Cooking a meal just for one person was no fun.

After the "TV dinner" had been eaten and the cutlery washed and put away, Celeste stood uncertainly at the kitchen table. The yellow Formica was curled up at one end and she tamped it down with the heel of one hand automatically, the way she'd seen her grandmother do countless times. She couldn't get the brief encounter with René out of her mind. Mostly what bothered her was the way he'd acted—so different from the last time she'd seen him. As if we were still friends.

She shook her head. Forget about René, he obviously forgot about me for a year. I should read a book instead of torturing myself. Celeste glanced through the archway to the bag by the front door. She'd brought home a wide selection—biographies, a mystery novel, even a book by a political philosopher. Reading filled the evenings when there were no good shows on TV and reading one difficult book each week made her feel as if she were still a student, even if she was not in college. Since she'd disconnected the cable and the AOL internet service there were only a few programs she liked watching. She lifted up the tote bag, and there was the envelope.

Celeste fingered the letter in a daze and stared unseeing at the picture above the desk. Is this for real? Or is this like one of those sweepstakes that says you're a finalist in some contest you've never entered and if only you buy subscriptions to half a dozen magazines you'd never read, you could win a million dollars? She'd never heard of Margaret McCade. She didn't even know that she had a great-aunt. But then, Celeste didn't know much about her family. Her grandparents hardly ever talked of other family members, not even about her parents. All she knew was that her mother had eloped when she was 17 and that Celeste had been born when her mother was 18, a year younger than Celeste was now. And that her parents had been killed in a car crash when Celeste was not even two years old.

Celeste realized that something had died in her grandmother when her only child was killed. She hardly ever spoke of her daughter's life. How often had she said to Celeste, I had to start again when they told us to come and get you. And you have brought me so much joy. More joy, thought Celeste with some bitterness, than my wild mother ever did.

She got up from the desk and walked into her grandmother's bedroom. Switching on the light, she surveyed the lace coverlet on the double bed and the two oak bedside tables. She had not been able to bring herself to do much to this room since Grandma died. She'd just put the furniture in it back the way Grandma had kept it before the hospital bed had taken up most of the living room and Grandma's bedroom had become a storage room for all the things that went along with hospital beds. The librarian, Emily Harrison, had helped her pack up Grandma's clothes for the Salvation Army—all except a few sweaters, coats and scarves, which Celeste wanted to keep. Other than that, Celeste had left the room pretty much intact.

The uneven floor boards were covered by a deep red and indigo Persian rug that her grandparents had bought at an auction after they'd come back to Val du Lac. Two oil paintings of men on horseback rounding up cattle that Gramps had given Grandma when he was courting her hung on the wall. Grandma liked to joke that she should have known when she saw the paintings that Gramps intended to take her off to live on a ranch, instead of in Val du Lac as she'd originally thought. The oak bureau, with the drawer pulls shaped like flowered wreaths, had belonged to Grandma when she was a young girl. Luckily, she'd left both the paintings and the bureau with her parents when she and her new husband had set off for Montana.

Celeste walked over to Grandma's bureau and picked up the silver-framed photo. It showed a young couple, their arms entwined behind their backs, standing in front of a battered vintage pick-up truck. A few years after Celeste's mother had run away to the big city with one of the ranch hands, her grandparents' house in Montana had burned down. They had escaped with just the nightclothes on their backs. Somehow this grainy photo had survived the fire. The young woman had long blonde hair and was wearing a flowered sun dress over her swollen belly. She was smiling at the camera. The young man had a beard and was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He was frowning, as if he were not happy at having his picture taken. It was the only photo of her parents that Celeste had ever seen. Jared always did like fooling with old cars, is all Gramps had ever said about her father.

Celeste put the heavy frame back on the bureau. When had her grandparents talked about their other relatives? She knew Gramps had come out West when he was a young man, drawn by the romance of ranching. He'd wanted to escape the skyscrapers of New York, he'd said, to breathe air that hadn't been breathed out of the lungs of a million other people. Celeste remembered him telling her that he'd fallen out with his parents because he didn't want to take over their business. But she didn't remember him talking about a sister. A brother yes, but they had been estranged and Gramps had not been in touch with him for years. When Gramps died, Grandma had not tried to contact him. Whatever had passed between the two brothers had obviously left a deep wound.

"I don't even know if he's alive," she'd told Celeste before the funeral. "And if he is alive, he probably won't come anyway."

Grandma's two older brothers had both been killed during World War II when they were young men. She didn't have any sisters. So who was this great-aunt?

Celeste turned out the light and went back into the sitting room. She picked up the letter again and reread it to make sure she hadn't misunderstood it the first time. But it really did say that she was the sole heir of Margaret Frances McCade and that she had inherited an apartment and "a modest sum of money".

Celeste wished again, as she'd wished so many times since she'd disconnected the internet, that she could get on her computer. It had been one of the decisions she'd made to save money after Grandma died and she found out how much Grandma owed to the bank and that she now owed to her friend Emily Harrison. But she would just have to wait until morning, when she could get on her computer at the library. Then she could find out if this was real. Would this "modest sum of money" be enough to pay off the debts I owe? Would I be able to go to college after all? I'd only be one year behind Melissa and my other classmates!

Most of Celeste's graduating class had drifted away since last year. The class had been drawn from several small farming communities and ranches in the northwest of the state and many of the kids had boarded with families in the town. Val du Lac was too small to provide jobs for all the graduates. Many of the boys had gone back to the ranches to become ranch hands, like their fathers. Others, like her best friend Melissa, had moved to Coeur d'Alene to attend college or find a job; a few had moved as far south as Boise, and some had just disappeared. Like René.

Celeste had been accepted at the University of Idaho in Boise but had deferred for a semester when her grandmother was hospitalized. But then the last hospital bill arrived, Celeste couldn't believe her eyes when she saw the amount still owed. Grandma had Medicare but it hadn't covered everything. She gave the bill to Grandma's lawyer, old Mr. Phillips who moved his lower denture from side to side while he was reading. He was the one handling her grandmother's estate. When he looked up, he said: "I'm afraid we'll have to sell the house. Your grandmother took out a new mortgage last year and what with the mortgage payments and the hospital bills, your Grandmother's estate owes a lot of money."

Celeste stared at him numbly. She had never had to think much about money before, Grandma had always taken care of everything. Celeste had used the money she made working odd jobs after school for herself but Grandma had said she didn't need to worry about college, it was all going to be paid for.

"I don't understand," Celeste blurted. "Why did Grandma take out a new mortgage? She never told me that. I thought she had money. She said college would be paid for…" Her voice trailed away.

Mr. Philips was looking at her sympathetically over the top of his glasses. "I'm sorry Celeste. But there isn't any money to pay for tuition at Idaho State University. I think your grandmother took out the loan against the house to pay for your tuition and living expenses. She'd told me she was expecting to get some money, but when it didn't arrive, she borrowed money against the house. Unfortunately, she must have used the money to pay the hospital bills because there isn't much money in her bank account. If you sell the house, you'll be able to pay off her debts and have enough to go to college in Coeur d'Alene."

Celeste couldn't believe this was happening to her—she'd lost her grandmother, now she was going to lose the house and her dream of going to university in Boise was also slipping away. Grandma had been so proud of her when she was accepted at Idaho State. "You'll be the first one in the family to go to university," she'd said.

Not anymore. Now she was going to lose the only home she'd ever known. Where am I going to go?

"You can live with me," her friend Melissa had said. "Forget Boise, you can start college in the summer in Coeur d'Alene. It won't be nearly as expensive as Idaho State and you'll only be one year behind."

Celeste was grateful for the offer. But Melissa didn't understand that losing the house would be like cutting off her last connection with her family. It was different for Mel—she still had parents to come home to. Celeste had no living relatives.

But, in the end, she couldn't sell the house because no one wanted to buy it at a high enough price to cover the mortgage and the hospital and nursing bills and even one year at a junior college. The real estate agent had been very apologetic. "Housing prices everywhere are depressed right now and in small towns like Val du Lac they are at rock bottom," he'd said. "May be things will be better next year." It was her Grandmother's friend Emily Harrison who had come to the rescue. She had loaned Celeste the money to pay off the hospital bills and pay off some of the equity loan Grandma had taken out so that Celeste could stay in the house.

But it also meant that she couldn't go to college, not even in Coeur d'Alene. Emily said she didn't have to hurry to pay back the loan but Celeste knew Emily wasn't rich. What she had lent Celeste was her life's savings. Celeste was determined to repay her, even if it took several years. She had tried to cut down on all unnecessary expenses and when her Nokia cell phone died, she did not replace it because she had the landline at the house and could use the library phone at work. So she did not renew the wireless contract when it expired a few weeks later. But if this letter is real… Suddenly, Celeste felt a glow of something like joy inside her, an ember that was springing to life. An apartment on Fifth Avenue! Isn't that one of the place names on that board game I loved to play as a child?

Giddy with excitement, Celeste picked up the phone and punched in her friend's telephone number.

"Hi, this is Melissa," said the recording. "Leave a message and I'll get back to you."

Deflated, Celeste hung up without leaving a message. If only she could have called René and told him. But she wouldn't call him now. Not ever.